Research Team: Arctic Anthropology

In the Arctic human life has relied on people’s relations to animals. People provided all their needs such as food, clothing, transport and housing as well as spiritual fulfilment through their hunting of wild and herding of domestic animals. Human-animal-environment relations are therefore at the core of our understanding of how people subsist, live and thrive in the Arctic.

In the Arctic region, people are constructing their lives in various ways, all considering the building blocks of a good life differently. Anthropological research shows that wellbeing is a multifaceted concept and can be perceived differently by diverse groups of people, culturally, collectively, and individually.

The Arctic continues to experience increased industrialisation, also related to the green transition. Anthropological research shows how such industries impact Arctic livelihoods and cultures – knowledge which becomes useful for environmental and social impact assessments in our research sites.

The word ’disaster’ is frequently associated with a wide array of contemporary problems of social or environmental nature. However, it is mainly seen as an event and often considered uni-dimensionally as issue of vulnerability, risk assessment or technological solutions. Based on case studies conducted in the Arctic (and also Sub-Antarctic) team members study different disastrous events (flooding, accidents on ice, arrival of invasive species etc) from a processual perspective framed under an umbrella concept – ‘sense of place. The research focuses on how despite of intensity of challenges, and the tension between ‘troubled’ property of the environment and its rendered meanings, the places still continue to anchor human lives. It studies the complexity of how a place is sensed through various forces and encounters between people and the environment.

Although a whole set of positive traits is assigned to ‘warmth’, ‘cold’ is often perceived as a burden. For Arctic residents ‘cold’ has provided opportunities to ‘enact’, experiment with and relate to it in many ways. Several economic sectors in the Arctic are very much focused on winter season – tourism, reindeer herding, vehicle testing industry, etc. Cold environment is conceptualized at a range of scales concerning the meanings and uses in relation to economic activities, regulations, mobility and risks. The research is focused on multiple forms of uses of cold in the Arctic regions (Finland, Norway, Russia). It analyses processes of ‘turning’ cold into a valuable symbolic and economic resource, creating a vision for winter in the context of environmental changes. Anthropology of cold investigates how physical properties of coldscape are experienced, used and interpreted among northern residents in a variety of social settings and different frameworks.

Oral history is at the crossroads of anthropology and historiography as scholarly disciplines. Merging biographical interviewing with participant observation and archival research, we are interested in how both indigenous people and settlers shaped and keep shaping grassroots-to-power relations. The Arctic regions have proven to be especially fruitful grounds for this, as in many places a strong state authority with its interests came in recently enough to be reflected in people’s memories. Topics of common relevance across different arctic regions, and both communist and capitalist ideologies, have proven to be education and sedentarization, disguising domination as civilizing mission; and the domination of nature by the state, ideologically justifying the extraction of its riches. In all these instances we are interested in the agency of people that produce creative and skillful adaptations on a wide spectrum between resistance and accommodation.

The Arctic areas display a lot of religious diversity, but originally all Arctic indigenous people shared animism as the basis of their cosmology – the idea that everything surrounding them has a soul. Hence, shamanism has been one form of religious practice widespread throughout the Arctic, which has also shaped the cultural heritage of the area, tangible and intangible, indigenous and local. We study both the past and present expressions of animism, including but not limited to sacred and rock art sites. Those span from prehistory 7000 years ago to the third century AD. Some of the most dynamically illustrated areas are located throughout Norway, Sweden, Finland and north-west Russia. We study present ways of engaging with cultural spiritual heritage through participant observation in shamanistic rituals and practices on the land in different parts of the Arctic.

According to the definition of sustainable development of the Brundtland Report 1987, the needs of the current generation should not jeopardize the opportunities of future generations to meet their own needs. Development programs often mention three dimensions of sustainability, i.e. environmental, social, and economic. Representatives of indigenous peoples have in addition stressed the importance of culture in this context. Ours anthropological approach to sustainability relies largely on local level collaboration with people and emphasizes a way of life connected to nature.

The ideas of circular bioeconomy is an important building block for the Green Transition on the planet. Team members study their practical implementation in small enterprises and initiatives, in one case even comparatively in two polar regions – Finland and Argentina. We compare how circular thinking, concepts and approaches can be translated into practice. What are their benefits and limits in the context of a spatial and cultural application? With our studies we cross the boundaries between research, education, and local and indigenous economic activities.